So it's perfectly fine to limit people to your online distribution system as long as you only make a game a year or so like Blizzard, Valve and Stardock, but it's massively evil if you make half a dozen games a year?

The effect on the consumer is certainly less drastic. Whether it's morally ok in a business context is kind of besides the point here. Valve has a mechanism for allowing their products to be offered by competitors, we can argue all day whether its a good one or not and whether it was designed with too much self-interest but its there. EA isn't doing that here, they are actively singling out and excluding a specific competitor. It's a different situation regardless of how you or anyone else feels about the players involved.

The core point is that Steam is too big. Steam is too powerful. Steam was on the road to becoming PC gaming in and of itself... are you a PC gamer? Nope, I am a Steam gamer! Indies and small studios talked about launching on "Xbox, PS3 and Steam" instead of "PC." I DO NOT LIKE THIS. I DO NOT WANT THIS. The PC is an open platform and I want many different avenues and pathways to buying games. I do not want the PC to be more console-like with a centralized authority running a controlled platform you have to go to in order to get anything. Steam is already on the verge of being that, over half the boxed games I buy go through Steam.

You just listed several reasons why you should be against this and the only reason you seem to be supporting it is because Steam is involved. Its exactly the kind of emotional response people are accusing you of in the first place. Whether people think of themselves as a "steam gamer" or how you interpret their behavior on forums has nothing to do with the situation.

Steam is the largest presence in DD because they were the first and because they offer a variety of features people desire. To date no one has replicated the Steam experience despite the formula being pretty simple. Even still it hasn't stopped a number of competitors from entering the market. We can argue all day about whether steam is good or bad but this kind of business oriented decision with no consumer interest is not the kind of response the industry should be using to fight Steam.